SA Sound

Throwing It Way Back: The B-52s Return to San Antonio

Released just three years ago, Live! 8-24-1979 is almost definitive proof that whichever parallel-reality America The B-52s swooped in from is clearly the superior one. Eisenhower-era cheese — beehive hairdos, tiki and hot-rod culture, etc. — was reappropriated and weaponized by punks who watched at least as many beach-party movies as biker-gang flicks (“Rock Lobster”) and shook their moneymakers doing the “Aqua Velva” and the “Hypocrite” (“Dance This Mess Around”). There, the disco vs. punk dichotomy must be nonexistent: Gay icon Fred Schneider gamely offering to “kiss your pineapple” on the dance floor deserves the same kind of guitar squawl as Roger Daltry growling “I hope I die before I get old” once merited (“Strobe Light”).

Between their self-titled debut and 2008’s comeback Funplex, The B-52’s have given us four decades of alternate American history with which to embellish and improve our own.

$49.50-$99.50, Wed Oct. 24, 7:30pm, Tobin Center for the Performing Arts, 100 Auditorium Circle, (210) 223-8624, tobincenter.org.
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